Description
The Buffet – two ways of laying on paint in one canvas
In Cézanne’s Buffet a laid table stands in front of a dark sideboard: a wine bottle, a blue glass, two cups on the shelf, apples and pears, and a carefully stacked pile of biscuits on a blue plate. A white cloth is thrown across it all. The canvas measures about 65 × 81 cm, was painted between 1877 and 1879, and is held by the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest (inv. 371.B). With us it becomes a hand-painted painting on canvas: oil laid on with a brush, not a print.
Thin wall, thick cloth
The 2012 restoration brought back into view what is most surprising here: the wall behind is laid in loosely and thinly, in an ash blue, while the cloth in front is built from dense, thickly applied paint. The thickly loaded white cloth gains a real body from this – the folds stand like a small piece of architecture, with sharp, almost angular edges. Two entirely different handlings of paint meet on the same canvas, and that difference is the first thing a reproduction loses, because it levels everything onto one even surface.
Why the cloth is not just fabric
In Cézanne the cloth is not decoration but a load-bearing element. Its folds take on the role of a support: they tie the table to the background and give the fruit a base it can actually rest on. Take it away in your mind and the whole thing collapses into a heap of objects. That is why the motif reads as calm and solid at once – nothing in it is accidental.
From L’Estaque to Budapest
Cézanne painted the canvas at L’Estaque, the coastal town near Marseille he often withdrew to. It reached Budapest from the former collection of Baron Ferenc Hatvany and is today among the best-known Cézannes in Central Europe. It was made in the years when the painter still moved among the Impressionists but was already after something else: a lasting form instead of the impression of a moment.
The Buffet belongs in the room where people eat and drink – a dining room, a kitchen with enough wall, a breakfast corner. Brown, blue and white sit well with wooden furniture, so the motif never forces itself forward. Fifteen formats are available, the largest measuring 180 × 144 cm; for a size in between we stretch the canvas to a custom size. Before deciding, look at the frame in our 3D preview application. Among our art paintings on canvas it stands beside Still Life with an Open Drawer, Still Life with a Curtain and Curtain, Jug and Fruit Bowl.
- Subject: The Buffet, Paul Cézanne, 1877-1879, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest (371.B)
- Technique: hand-painted work, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the 2012 restoration revealed how differently thick the paint lies
